Paris Fashion Week: Carven autumn/winter 2012

Who is the Carven customer? It's worth asking because while Guillaume Henry, the former assistant designer at Givenchy and previously at Paul Ka, is doing an excellent job carving out a distinctive line of sharply tailored separates, their abbreviated lengths, sometimes shrunken and high-waisted proportions make them very particular.

I'm thinking they'd appeal to Agnès, the convent educated love-child of Carla Bruni and Mick Jagger, who has never known her parents and takes compensatory consolation in blowing her mystery inheritance on clothes that none of her contemporaries can afford.

The only problem is Agnès doesn't exist. But you catch the drift: you need to have youth and money to wear these clothes and - more to the point, you need poise. Oodles of it. They're more Alice in Wonderland than rock and roll. To wit, those high-waisted silk sleeveless dresses, layered over printed silk blouses and short, stiff, bell-skirted cocktail frocks.

These are lavish dolly clothes: suede dresses lasered into fine lace, inverted box pleated mini skirts in brocade, shortish coats with lashings of dyed fur and adorable jackets in stripy silk or chartreuse wool tweed, with matching shorts and clompy Mary Janes. The jackets would seem to be the easiest sell, although their high, narrow arm holes mean they're not for the ample busted or wide-backed. Très elegant though.